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Are 'Fast & Furious' Actors Really Speed Demons?

By Robert Pace 1:41 AM PDT, May 6, 2013

The stars of the Fast & Furious franchise have been surrounded by fast cars for 12 years now. With all that exposure to roaring engines and burning rubber, are they fast and furious when they get behind the wheel in real life?

The action series, which began in 2001, may be a fictional representation for its four core actors (Vin Diesel, Jordana Brewster, Paul Walker, and Michelle Rodriguez), but it has served as a real-life venue for them to unleash their furiousness, as they are the ones driving in a good portion of their scenes.

The experience has been a thrill for a longtime car lover like Walker, who has starred in all but one of the series' six films, and also a newcomer like Rodriguez, who didn't have her license prior to the production of the first film.

When ET's Rocsi asked Walker if he could count on his fingers the amount of speeding tickets he's tallied in his life, the 39-year-old actor admitted that he might need more digits than his ten fingers—or even his twenty combined fingers and toes.

Although his character "Dom" has an affinity for zipping over asphalt, Diesel revealed that he isn't the speed demon that his character is because it would dent his public image if he were to receive a speeding ticket.

"I used to get speeding tickets back in New York when I was crazy, and then I started playing the Dom Toretto role and I feel like if I'm caught one mile over the speed limit, there's going to be a national holiday," he said.

Rodriguez, whose character makes a return to the franchise after she was presumed dead in Fast Five, divulged that first learning to drive for the production of The Fast and the Furious may have caused her to form some reckless driving habits.

"I got such a bad record with speeding 'cause I got my license for 'Fast and Furious,'" said Rodriguez, who was 22 when she began filming the series. "After 11 points on your license, you're like, 'Yo, where's that Prius at? I'm dropping this M3 somewhere.'"